NMH art teacher responds to rise of AI in solo exhibit

Amid the spread of artificial intelligence, one art teacher at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill is protesting with paint.

Stephen Allison teaches Two-Dimensional Design and Drawing and Composition at the school. In his artist’s statement, he described the process behind his solo exhibit at the Rhodes Arts Center, called “Out of the Frame,” as “a physical practice that stands as a deliberate plea against the rapid, encroaching machinery of automation, AI and what I view as a rising techno-fascism.”

Five of Allison’s prints twist the famous words from American folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie’s guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” His daughter dances behind the fuchsia letters of “This machine moves” in one print, while his son beams behind his bike and the blue words, “This machine frees” in another.

Along a different wall in the exhibit hangs Allison’s response to the 2024 election.

As he processed his despair and disbelief over the outcome, he remembered thinking, “What can I do that might be productive?”

The answer was art.

Allison thought back to some posters from the 1930s he had discovered. Instead of advertising travel destinations and tobacco like these prints, Allison’s colorful posters illustrated instructions like “engage,” “endure” and “seek shelter.” In the final print, tangerine orange, green and midday blue are used to portray a student Allison coached on the mountain biking team below the words, “steel yourself.” With “inspirational” fortitude, the student refused to let a broken arm eliminate her smile, Allison said.

“I was trying not to stay in despair,” he said. “I was trying not to just dwell.”

These two collections of prints mix illustrations with text to call out the “techno-fascism.” Other works whisper Allison’s protest.

Through portraits of trees on the NMH campus, he hoped to snap viewers back into the present moment with illustrations of the environment outside of their screens.

“It is far too easy to sleepwalk (scroll) through an increasingly automated life,” Allison wrote in his artist’s statement. “When we ground ourselves in the immediate sensuality of living, we appreciate the gift of being fully alive.”

In one painting, a blushing tree waves its branches with heavy lines and layers that echo Vincent van Gogh’s thick brushstrokes.

To Allison, trees “present themselves to us and show us they actually are living the seasonal cycles. … They’re like, ‘Look, this is where you are. I’m showing you where you are right now.'”

Allison painted most of his pieces before printmaking became his favorite medium. He admitted that starting with a paint brush for the trees instead of a linoleum block felt uncomfortable at first, but worth the nerves.

“Everything in here is in some form humanmade, but this is … a little more tactile,” he said of the paintings. “This was a way of getting back to that more immediate process — making a mark and having that be a thing, instead of making a carving and then making an image off of that. I wanted to get back to that feeling of immediacy.”

Whether his works call back to an old advertisement, a notorious guitar or a scene of his two daughters sharing a quiet moment in quarantine, all of Allison’s art follows the same commitment.

“I always want to have evidence of my hand in the work,” Allison said. “I still want you to feel like it’s me — somebody touched that.”

As AI continues to step between people, from agents that order food to chatbots that give users advice, Allison asks, “What’s going to be our value to one another?”

“It’s going to be the fact that we have skills, that we can speak to one another, that don’t involve this intermediary,” he said. “We’ve so surrendered our communication to one another to the intermediary, this is my attempt to push back on that.”

Visits to the exhibit, which runs through Friday, Oct. 23, can be arranged by appointment with Gallery Coordinator Mona Seno at mseno@nmhschool.org.